Dr Dilantha Gunawardana is a molecular biologist, who graduated from the University of Melbourne. He moonlights as a poet. Dilantha wrote his first poem at the ripe age of 32 and now has more than 1700 poems on his blog. His poems have been accepted/published in Forage, Kitaab, Eastlit, American Journal of Poetry and Ravens Perch, among others. He was also awarded the prize for "The emerging writer of the year - 2016" in the Godage National Literary Awards, Sri Lanka for his first collection of poems (Kite Dreams – A Sarasavi Publication), while being shortlisted for the poetry prize. Dilantha is a dual citizen of Sri Lanka and Australia, and shares his experiences from two different cultures. He blogs at - https://meandererworld. wordpress.com/

Tag: Donald Trump

Father’s Day is a farce.
Its that time of the month
That on a Sunday, you go to your parents house
With a cake and cut one mouthwatering slice
To reflect on the years gone by.

My dad always had a blueprint
For life, he always saw the unlocked gate
Or the un-padlocked bag with a bigger eye.
Danger was a constant threat to him
And all he could do was worry, even when I’m
Five minutes away from arriving back at the house,
Or when I speed at 100 kmph on the freeway.
And he had a blue vein that gets bigger
On the forehead, every time something
Uncomfortable was about to happen.

And from the window of my house, I see a street light
Under a full moon. A metaphor for my dad,
Who fosters the fine art of near-perfection
Around the edges and jello in the middle.
That’s what he calls love these day.

And I’m that street light that looks
Up to the sky, when sons are perennial understudies
That pass their days lighting the bulb on top,
Which always looks a little paler, a little un-incandescent
Next to that well-rounded bald moon,
That is my dad, on the reclining chair
Rabbiting away at the news
Of how Trump this or Trump that.
– And No, he is no Trump fan. –

And I look at his bald head
Bright on top as any bald man is,
No head lice or dandruff, just a brief
Comb-over that gives some modesty
To the fur. Sometimes, I look at him combing his hair
Caught in his own world, a little tradition he tells me
Only bald men can correlate to.
Those little strands of ego that are fertilized
With coconut oil and fly carelessly
In the savage wind and how he chases his hair
And tucks it in a few times a day.

And I sometimes see him looking at Mr Trump’s hair on TV.
That blue vein on the forehead bulging out

Only god gets to say
Looking in the eye with a little arrogance,
“you’re fired”, while flipping his quarter pounder hair
Like a Big Mac, striking fear through every muscle
On the chin and cheek.

And still there’s something about God
That you just cannot ignore.
Like the mogul heart and boyish twitter account,
A virile potency that shames most men his age,.
The flaming beauty sharing his bed,
An eastern-European accent that makes among
Other things, empires rise and conquer,
And a babyish chubbiness that makes
Plus-size, a little extra chin and muffin top,
And still, an endearment.

And he will always be the great white hope
Of a land that has seen decibels of brays and trumpets
Dividing a patchwork land
Both crying freedom and foul. While the seed
Of Kunta Kinte rises like the tide of the river Gambia
Demanding equality – Martin’s dream
That echoes at best, like the lonely dribble of a basketball
At the hands of a young black man
In a Washington DC court.

And God-haters will line up in the streets
In the name of science and arts
Or for the 14 year old felled by the albino trigger.
They will sing, dance, write and explore
How to make America a bunch of God hating atheists.
Forgetting for a moment that landslides
Of the heart and ballot, were once a story
In the American heartland.

And God will promise little things
How to balance opinions and cheque-books
While the polls see-saw. Storming on
Like a Walmart cart on a Friday night
Opening up like a packet of Lays chips
And watering the flower bed of the American economy
Long before taking time to smell the blooms.

And God is everywhere.
He is on CNN and Fox, on the church nave,
On twitter, in every sensitive issue
That needs some political incorrectness,
– Some long-needed honesty –
On the lips of every refugee and drug mule
And on the long road to recovery
Of mistakes made long ago.

And they say Moby dick was a fat white whale.
So is God. Pequods will rush, Ahabs will roam
And still there’s an ocean that needs
A larger than life. One day they will say
God went through this dust bowl
And made it into a promise land.
And protecting the ten commandments
Of the great American constitution
Will be his greatest redemption.

And there’s something sharp about a God
Who drives the message in like a golf cart.
And knows when to play the trump card.
And heaven is just a little oval office
And command central, from where
He will send angels and thunderbolts
To the great turquoise playing field.
And do wonders with the hearts
That need moving.

And bridge he will, everything symbolic
About America, The tint and the shade
The ghettos and the mansions
The sleeping and the sleepless
While stalemates slowly turn to landslides.

And there’s nothing ironic about
That beautiful autumn day in November
When fate wished America

I know some countdowns will never start
Or end. Of life, the launches that we do
In our bedrooms, in our heart and in our books.

We make hairstyles redundant,
And some avant-garde, and a little difference
In how the privileged call all the shots.
The dichotomy of stripes and stars.
In one first-world country

And there is one man
Who with a comb-over took the peoples power
To where there is an oval bureau inside white facades.
A man who can comb the economy in so many different ways
And stabilize it with gel or hairspray.

And I still think of that great nation.
Of how the corn bowl carries bigger than life maize plants.
And how in a border town, stunted yellow-skinned Mexicans
Look up to a species domesticated. For renewal of their god-forsaken lives.

And they hide inside their hearts
Kernals of teosinte, wild corn, hoping for
A bigger cob of maize, prosperity. Knowing
It only needs one cross, some chiasma, to breed fat cobs
Spilling over with juicy kernals.

And they carry rosaries of the Virgin Mary.
In their pockets, and recite Hail Marys
As they make the long journey over a dessert.

And they will meet lady Liberty one forthcoming day
In a dessert town in California. When they
Will smile to each other and give each other
Hugs and high fives. A much-anticipated play date with freedom.

In that suit-clad exterior
Of a slogan-flasher, word-warrior
And crowd chaser – rarely pleaser
Is a man who is perennially torn
By inner demons and outer stage
A man who is pole-vaulting
To the center stage of the oval office
And be patriarch of the first family
Singing with spin doctors and dancing with witch doctors
As a perennial pyromaniac and occasional blame-gamer
Basking in circadian cycles – of dark and light
When on interfaces of dusk and dawn
Lies his true mettle when foul words
And a razor sharp tone echo
Through petrified American hearts
When how big your waistline
Or how big your hair is, does not matter
Only how big that flame in your heart is
Burning to a trickle of shale oil
Flaming threads of countless nerves
Pumping out adrenaline – in the absence of serotonin
After all trump-ets are not just
For vaudeville or the circus
They too are there to usher in
An unlikely trump suite to fate’s democracy
In one hand of poker.